There are days when I can't think of anything other than food. These are the days I feel incredibly insecure about my body. I don't know when was the last time I put anything inside my mouth without the accompanying fear of gaining weight.
What gives me solace is that I am not alone in this struggle. Even the super gorgeous Alia Bhatt, the quintessential millennial success story, suffers from these insecurities. Recently, in an interview with Barkha Dutt, she revealed that the only thing she would want to change about herself is her constant obsession with what she was eating and her weight. There is absolutely no weight that Alia can possibly lose any further. But she, too, is tormented by these thoughts and finds it difficult to deal with the craving of digging into a box of French fries, apparently something she loves way too much to give up completely.
One must ponder why an actress, who has had a terrific run at the box office and married the love of her life, would single out not being able to eat French fries as a cause of grief in life. Because life is unremarkable on most days. Some of us are so bogged down by the challenges of daily living, punishing long hours at work, the deadlines and the endless phone calls, that a good meal remains our only resort to some kind of comfort.
Being a public figure, Alia's rather unhealthy relationship with food is recorded for us to dissect. A couple of years back, a private video of a hungry Alia crying because there was nothing healthy on the menu for her to eat went viral. Her friend and co-star Varun Dhawan was recording and found it extremely amusing that one could cry the way she did when hungry. He couldn't stop laughing. Netizens thought it was cute. What we missed was that this was a 20-something struggling with eating a satisfying meal, because nothing on the menu was “healthy” enough, by which we mean not fat-free, not calorie-free, and certainly not guilt-free. I could instantly connect with the video because it was the same time during which I was going through a major physical transformation. I had lost all my extra weight, was on a strict diet and was working out twice a day.
Every outing with my friends was a torment. There was nothing on the menu that was remotely fulfilling and didn't come with an extra serving of guilt. I didn't dare eat those many calories given it would mean wasting the killing squash session I had in the morning, and then another punishing session in the gym in the evening. Every time I tried to order online because I was too tired to cook, and too poor to hire a cook, I cried just the same way. During the promotion of Kalank on the sets of The Kapil Sharma Show, Alia's reaction to drinking sweetened coffee got a lot of traction. In the video, she was seen taking a sip out of the coffee mug and instantly wanted to throw up because she had consumed the new villain of modern times — sugar. She looked visibly disturbed and advised the rest of the crew to avoid sugar as it is known to be “bad for health”.
Hence, when she comes around and accepts that she has been too hard on herself and that all she wants to do after all the success is eat some French Fries without any guilt, one finds her to be extremely endearing. While emotional eating is a problem and one must be vigilant about it, if food is your way to get through a difficult day, just indulge in it, without worrying about the weight. The idea of eating healthy and how we look is so intertwined that it's no longer possible to separate the two. The irony is that as long as we don't de-link food and our body weight, we wouldn't be able to ever eat right.
(The writer is a mental health and behavioural sciences columnist, conducts art therapy workshops and provides personality development sessions for young adults. She can be found as @the_millennial_pilgrim on Instagram and Twitter.)
